[HN Gopher] People who won't give up floppy disks
___________________________________________________________________
People who won't give up floppy disks
Author : hoppyhoppy2
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-05-11 10:41 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| greenbit wrote:
| Just think of them as tangible icons for the items they contain.
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| Many many years ago I read an observation that men tend to keep
| unchanged into their later years the hairstyle that they happened
| to have in the period of the lives when their were the happiest.
|
| I think that probably applies to things other than hairstyle,
| like storage media :-)
|
| I have tried to analyze about myself in which aspects of life I'm
| doing the same thing. It's not true for hair/clothing styles or
| tech. But surely I'm not so unique that I'm immune to this
| effect? I wonder if this phenomenon can also manifest in more
| subtle ways, e.g. you keep the slang from the time when you were
| the happiest, or the ideology, or etc. Might be true about music,
| I seemed to have stopped evolving in my music taste unless when I
| put in deliberate effort (which I rarely do, because I don't
| think it's something worth optimizing form).
| lotrjohn wrote:
| Perhaps this explains why I have a collection of over 10 CRT
| television sets squirrelled away in the various corners of my
| house...yes, I know it's a sickness.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Zip drives FTW
| bombcar wrote:
| Click. Click. Click.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Nothing bets a hardrive wrapped in a blanket, in case you
| accidentally hit or drop the bag you put it in. This is how
| we did in my university, in late 1990s.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Jazz drives FTL
|
| Literally threw one against a wall to destroy it and never
| get tempted to use one ever again.
|
| Went back to a 150Mb QIC tape drive for a while thanks to
| Jazz.
|
| The stuff of nightmares.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Jaz was really that bad? I've been pondering buying a scsi
| one for my retro PC.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| minidisk or superdisk ftw
| pasquinelli wrote:
| i only used a zip drive once or twice. obviously that was
| decades ago, but in my head they are still the height of
| computing luxury.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Until the click of death. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death
|
| I'm more in favour of MiniDisc. Compact enough, large enough
| for storage but Sony screwed up with DRM requiring a Sonic
| Stage, eurk.
| projektfu wrote:
| Headline: these people who use floppy disks are obsolete but not
| gone.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Give me petabyte sized floppies, they were peak user experience.
| Microsd is too easy to lose.
| masklinn wrote:
| NVMe SSDs in USB enclosures is probably what you're looking
| for. I assume tool-less enclosures exist if you don't want to
| buy multiple.
| mrob wrote:
| I miss the predictability of floppy disks. Assuming it was
| manufactured correctly, a floppy disk would always act like every
| other floppy disk. You could look at it and see everything there
| was to see. It didn't have firmware with mysterious origins and
| capabilities. If you bought a floppy disk from a reputable
| manufacturer and it failed, it was usually your own fault. Modern
| flash drives fail for inscrutable reasons, and that makes them
| more stressful to work with.
| doubloon wrote:
| i remember differently you buy 1.2 and accodentally stick in a
| 360 or was it vice versa... and things dint work right. Diff
| drives had diff head widths. Also apple vs commodore vs pc vs
| mac. Then there was dust and untecoverable read errors
| mrob wrote:
| I remember floppy disks failing, but mostly things like free
| AOL trial disks I repurposed by covering the write protect
| hole. I assume those were the cheapest they could find. The
| major brand name ones generally worked reliably.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Floppy disks were anything but predictable.
|
| My mom was at a public office where they would get data on
| floppy disks, and read issues were super common and reliability
| was really hit or miss, data corruption, sector errors, you
| name it.
| greenbit wrote:
| Abort, Retry, Ignore?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| "Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?"
| IshKebab wrote:
| Modern flash drives are _at least_ an order of magnitude more
| reliable than floppy disks were. This is just rose-tinted
| nostalgia.
| jjav wrote:
| > Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more
| reliable than floppy disks were.
|
| I don't know if that is true. I have 5.25" floppies from
| ca.1990 that were readable as of just a couple years ago, so
| about 30 years.
|
| You're saying flash drives are readable for at least 300
| years? I don't know but I doubt that.
|
| (The floppies might still be readable today, I just haven't
| tried. The content is now archived in a zfs pool.)
| bennyhill wrote:
| The flash drives give an interesting sense of reliability
| since the controller will keep freshening and error
| correcting. I havent dared to leave one unplugged for a few
| years with data I wanted.
| IshKebab wrote:
| No I mean short term reliability (like less than a decade).
| dwb wrote:
| I treated floppies fine and they were a constant pain. They
| give a nostalgic pang, but I'm very glad to see the back of
| them in actual use.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I was surprised the story claimed that 3.5" disks weren't
| "floppy", just based on their external shell.
|
| EDIT: Back when they were in common use, I remember that computer
| people generally called them "3.5 inch floppy disks", and non-
| computer called them "hard disks". Which caused some initial
| confusion because computer people meant something else by "hard
| disk".
|
| It looks like there's still some debate about the ambiguity of
| the terms:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335352/what-s-so...
| nullhole wrote:
| Well, 5 1/4" disks were floppy on the inside & outside, so
| compared with them, 3.5" disks weren't floppy.
|
| To me, at least, the name 'floppy disk' already felt like an
| anachronism, even in the heyday of 3.5" disks.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I don't think they were as long-lived as their brethren, but
| can't forget about the extra floppy 8-inchers!
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I found one of those in a folder at work a few months ago
| and was surprised how extra-floppy it was. I grew up with
| mostly 3 1/2" diskettes and some 5 1/4" disks, so the
| "floppy" name always seemed like a bit of a stretch. Seeing
| an 8" disk really made more sense why they called it that.
|
| (Eight inches was a really clever size for storage in a
| paper-based office environment... It fits just right in a
| spot meant for a sheet of letter or A4!)
| julian_t wrote:
| A South African colleague of mine reasoned that if 5.25"
| disks were "floppies", then the 3.5" ones must be "stiffies".
| Somehow this never caught on at work.
| edward28 wrote:
| Hey, my stiffies' average size.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Here in Finland the terms for 3.5" floppies is "korppu", a type
| of hard biscuit, do distinguish them from "lerppu" "floppy",
| which refers to the older 5 1/4" discs that actually flopped
| around.
| nullhole wrote:
| What's the word for "hard disk"?
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Current day term is "kovalevy", literally just "hard disk"
| or "hard sheet". Sheet as in sheet of decently thick metal
| plate or marble counter top.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They aren't floppy. They're just called that because old disks
| really were floppy and the name stuck.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you open one, you'll see that the disk is floppy. As
| floppy as the larger versions of it.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I know but the _whole thing_ isn 't floppy. The earlier
| ones were called floppy disks because the whole thing was
| floppy, including the case. You could literally bend them.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you are going that way, the whole thing isn't a disk
| either. And it wasn't a disk on the previous model
| either.
|
| Hard disks on the other hand, had hard disks. While the
| whole thing was way more rigid than a 3 1/2 floppy, and
| hasn't been a disk since they started selling it.
| Clubber wrote:
| Floppy square. I still have some old floppy squares in a
| closet somewhere.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| The only person I ever heard call them "hard disks" was as a
| joke in a cartoon[1]. Non-computer people I knew called them
| stuff like "little floppies" to distinguish them from the big 5
| 1/4" ones. Windows used "floppy" for both in the file manager.
|
| 1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnLBNS9jDw&t=1m8s
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Aren't they exaggerating a bit? You can go to Amazon and buy
| 3.5'' floppy 10 packs, and a USB UFI drive...
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| There is a lot of options too, for both drives and disk packs,
| and inexpensive. I wonder who is using them mostly.
| DontBreakAlex wrote:
| If it works, don't fix it
| fxj wrote:
| For legacy hardware (synths, samplers) there are not many options
| when the company who produced them is out of business like E-mu
| or Ensoniq. I have 2 of these old keyboards and now I am trying
| to replace the floppy und SCSI drives with something more modern.
| For floppys there is the Gotek FlashFloppy which replaces the
| floppy drive with a USB adapter. But it is a mess to install it.
| Also it does not work with all legacy synths. For SCSI there
| exists the RaSCSI solution which is a Raspi nano or pico which
| emulates a SCSI drive.
|
| https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-g...
|
| https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/
| jmclnx wrote:
| When this comes up, I always mention I like the convenience of
| diskettes and the fact they were rather cheap. I had no issues
| giving or mailing someone a diskette and never getting the media
| back.
|
| CDs/DVDs are a PITA to write, plus most are write once. Plus you
| cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of
| diskettes were. These days, with flash drives, I would want the
| media back.
|
| Back then, documents would fit on 1 diskette, now documents
| created with office applications are at best multi-MB, some
| approaching 1 gig.
|
| Yes there is email and things, but I know some lawyers who like
| to distribute documents on brand new physical media because for
| them, encryption is hard and their clients have no clue about
| encryption. So they buy flash drives for that these days.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Strange flashdrives are also a bit sketchy.
|
| I know there were diskette-viruses, but you can straight up fry
| a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB
| in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in
| mind.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that
| has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to
| be designed with security in mind.
|
| I don't think it's fair to claim USB is insecure because you
| can buy accessories that charge a capacitor bank over the 5V,
| and then feed that back to the computer.
|
| That could be solved by using an isolated hub to host USB
| devices, like the Spectra 3022. Then again, if you have
| equipment that expensive, I hope you're not plugging random
| stuff into it...
| temp0826 wrote:
| I wonder if there's a market for USB hubs with
| breakers/fuses to protect against this. Probably only
| security researchers plugging in known-sketchy things
| though.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| The thing is, adding an inline fuse doesn't guarantee
| that the host would be safe: if the fuse doesn't blow
| quick enough and lets enough current through, that's bad
| (plus, you'd have to add a fuse to P-, D+, D- and P+ just
| to be sure, not to mention USB3). The best option would
| probably be a complete isolation of the USB device from
| the host, with a hub that then transfers D- and D+ to the
| host without a direct electrical connection (while
| providing its own P- and P+). Think TOSlink, but for USB.
| utensil4778 wrote:
| Galvanic USB isolators are a thing. Mostly for medical
| applications, but it's literally a chip you can buy off
| the shelf that provides total electrical isolation (with
| the addition of an isolated 5v supply).
| 6SixTy wrote:
| There are digital isolator ICs, like ADUM3166 from Analog
| Devices, though like none of them are for USB 3.0+ Awful
| lot of isolation transformers in the IC diagram, so I'm
| sure that something like the transformers used for
| Ethernet could be reused to protect basically any USB
| ports from a USB killer attack, though they are awfully
| big for a smartphone
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can either have a port where you can run trusted devices
| without hassle, or one where you can input untrusted data
| safely. You can't have the same port do both.
| amelius wrote:
| My first Linux distro was about 50 diskettes ;)
| rpdillon wrote:
| Same! I think it was back in 1997 in college, and my dorm
| mate only had 4 floppies sitting around, and Slackware was
| around 50, so I kicked off the installation with the first
| couple of disks, and when I'd finish up with one I'd toss it
| across the hall to him, and he'd reimage it with the next in
| the sequence and toss it back. Pretty tedious, but it got the
| job done.
|
| I'll never forget how foreign Slackware felt after having
| grown up on DOS. It wasn't long before I got used to it,
| though, and I never did go back. Great memories.
| cjk2 wrote:
| I had that but with a two mile walk round trip :(
| bandie91 wrote:
| mine was tomsrtbt[1]. 1 diskette.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt
| vkaku wrote:
| MicroSD cards would fit that definition today: cheap,
| lightweight, writeable and somewhat reliable.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Not _that_ cheap, almost no computer has an exposed port for
| it, and way too lightweight for that use.
|
| But yes, it's the closest we have.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Yes there is email
|
| It may very well not be. Email is iffy for people that share
| the same domain, and completely useless for sharing stuff with
| random people.
|
| That one democratic tool is already completely tamed out, and
| presents no risk for our corporate overloads anymore.
| GJim wrote:
| YOu can't make that comment without justification!
|
| Email for sharing documents _just works_ for me and the vast
| majority of the business and IT world. Frankly, I don 't
| agree with you.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as
| a box of diskettes were.
|
| Actually, that's close. On AliExpress, you can get 10 1GB USB
| sticks for about $15. Adjusted for inflation, that's about how
| much a box of 10 cheap 1.44MB floppies cost in 1990. It became
| a bit cheaper in the late 90s, but that's about the time CD-R
| took over for the purpose of handing out stuff.
|
| Of course, these cheap USB sticks are not the most reliable by
| far, but neither were diskettes, at least for the cheap ones,
| they were absolutely terrible in that regard.
| forinti wrote:
| Someone put a floppy icon on our intranet not long ago. I looked
| at it and sensed it was wrong. It was a bottom-side view and the
| dented corner was on the right.
|
| It's become an abstract symbol. Young people don't ever see the
| real thing.
| Clubber wrote:
| A probably fake anecdote is a young person saw a disk and
| asked, "Why do you have a 3D printed save button?" I did have
| someone refer to a CD drive tray as a cup holder once though.
| rm445 wrote:
| People might remember the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue
| audio input, that you could use to play music from other sources
| on a tape-only car stereo.Does something similar exist for legacy
| floppy drives? Like a fake floppy with a micro SD card slotted
| in.
|
| Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess
| you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation. Perhaps if you had
| some legacy musical or scientific instrument with a tape drive
| you'd be better swapping out the whole drive with something that
| presented as a floppy drive to the device?
| amelius wrote:
| > Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I
| guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation.
|
| Wasn't the rotational speed more or less fixed?
| crtasm wrote:
| I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath but it required a
| device driver.
| proamdev123 wrote:
| > the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input
|
| It was called a "cassette adapter" (for anyone interested in
| looking it up).
| xjlin0 wrote:
| Does BART still use them?
| kkfx wrote:
| Not so adherent to the article topic but more related to the
| title: I suspect a large number of people is incapable to evolve,
| no matter what. They have learnt something and they want to keep
| that for their entire life, no matter if it's good or not, no
| matter if better options are available or not.
|
| This is a damn issue because it means we need to squeeze many out
| of the society anytime we want to evolve.
| SteveMoody73 wrote:
| It's probably more nostalga than anythng but I do sometimes miss
| the sound of floppy drives and hard drives. With modern computers
| there is usually no disk activity indicators and silent drives.
|
| I was working on restoring an old Amiga 500 recenty and the sound
| of a game booting off disk is so satisfying.
| asjo wrote:
| The FS-UAE emulator (https://fs-uae.net/) emits the familiar
| grinding floppy disk sounds of Amigas, if you need a hit
| without getting the old hardware out :-)
|
| I was surprised by the sounds while trying "Little Computer
| People" for a nostalgia trip after reading "Hacking Little
| Computer People on the Amiga"
| (http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/hacking-little-computer-
| people-o...) last summer.
| abruzzi wrote:
| Like the musician in the story, I have many synthesizers with
| floppy drives. I love the synth, but not the floppies. I keep
| floppies around because I have to in order to keep the synth
| operable, but I am slowly changing the floppies out of floppy
| emulators. At $100 a pop it's slow going.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-11 23:01 UTC)